Command & Conquer : Renegade

Behind Enemy Lines

Haven't I seen you somewhere before?

Making a first person shooter set in the Command & Conquer
universe must have seemed like a great idea at the time.
Essentially Westwood have taken the lone wolf missions from the
million selling real-time strategy series and given you a ground
floor view of the action.
Playing as the elite GDI commando Havoc you get to rampage your way
through NOD lines, dealing with kidnapped scientists, hideous
experiments, tiberium mutants and tactical nuclear strikes along
the way. Settings vary from the rubble-strewn streets of an
occupied village to the coastal defences of a NOD stronghold, and
although the graphics are fairly primitive by modern standards they
do an adequate job of bringing the C&C world to life in 3D for
the first time.
Missions typically begin with a pre-rendered briefing from your
commanding officer aboard a GDI ship, although things rarely go
according to plan and you will find yourself bombarded with
additional objectives from the moment you hit the ground. Radio
messages from your CO, local resistance fighters and other GDI
units come thick and fast, and you'll find yourself being
sidetracked to rescue trapped soldiers, take out SAM sites and blow
up power plants along the way to your primary objective. Luckily a
vast array of weapons is available to help you make it to the end
in one piece, from your basic pistol and assault rifle to
flamethrowers, chainguns, lasers, explosives and personal ion
cannons. There's even a rather tasty sniper rifle, allowing you to
pick off enemies from a safe distance.

I'm With Stupid

A group of NOD soldiers get tired of the constant violence and run off to join the circus as acrobats. Or it could just be the result of one of the game's more amusing bugs.

But however good the idea behind Renegade, the actual
implementation varies from merely shoddy to downright atrocious.
The game has evidently been programmed by a troupe of poorly
trained circus chimps and the AI gives a whole new meaning to the
word "stupid", making the braindead units of the original Command
& Conquer look like Albert Einstein by comparison.
Enemy soldiers seem to follow a philosophy of "if I can't see you,
you can't see me", as a result of which they sometimes ignore you
completely as you blast away at an exposed arm or leg from around a
corner, or shoot them in the back as they reverse into you. This
problem is even worse when it comes to vehicles, because if they
can't find a way to reach you they simply stop dead and sit there
impassively as you pump rockets into an exposed corner of their
bodywork from the comfort of your hiding place.
In some of the missions you have the misfortune to find yourself
fighting alongside other GDI troops, and they turn out to be just
as incompetent. The AI has no sense of self preservation, and
soldiers will quite happily wander into the line of fire and then
stand there getting toasted without even bothering to shoot back.
While this just looks incredibly stupid most of the time, if your
mission is to escort an NPC to the exit and he keeps running off
ahead of you and getting shot, it soon becomes frustrating.

Save Often, This Is A Tough Mission

This is a one way road from objective 1 to objective 2, with no side turns or detours.

Westwood have compensated for the stupidity of their NOD troops by
giving them powerful weapons and near perfect aim and then throwing
vast numbers of them at you, particularly in the later stages of
the game. This can make things incredibly difficult, especially as
snipers and rocket troops can take you out in one or two shots, and
as a result the developers have had to pad almost every room with
health, armour and ammunition to keep you alive.
The maps themselves are often completely linear, leading you from
one mob of enemies to the next with little opportunity for detours
along the way. Side roads are conveniently blocked off with
barricades, and despite being a highly trained special forces type,
Havoc is so feeble he can't clamber his way over a crate, jump more
than a few inches off the ground or swim across the shallowest
puddle. This means that areas which would be easily accessible in
any other first person shooter are beyond reach in Renegade,
leaving you feeling penned in.
Adding some variety to the proceedings is the inclusion of
vehicles, but again you are limited in where you can take them by
the level design and only a handful are actually driveable in the
single player campaign. The controls are simple enough - look
around and aim the gun with your mouse and turn, accelerate and
reverse with the standard movement keys - but something about the
soggy physics and bland sound effects makes the vehicles seem
insubstantial, so you never really feel like you're rumbling around
in a mammoth tank.

Gameplay Pending

The first harvester rumbles out towards the tiberium field in a C&C match

Renegade's saving grace should have been its multiplayer support,
with the innovative Command & Conquer mode effectively putting
you into the middle of a first person real-time strategy game with
up to 32 players. You can explore a full-scale C&C base,
purchase vehicles to drive (from mobile artillery and stealth tanks
to humvees and flamethrowers) and watch AI-controlled harvesters as
they drive out to mine tiberium, adding extra credits to your
team's income.
Each side has its own unique selection of units, and players can
cash in credits to switch to a more advanced troop class, from
rocket soldiers and snipers to characters from the single player
campaign, each with their own primary weapon and a pistol and
explosives for backup. You can even become an engineer and run
around repairing buildings, vehicles and other players. Ultimately
the goal is to destroy the enemy base, and the loss of each
building has much the same effect as it would have in a traditional
C&C game, reducing the speed at which vehicles are produced,
narrowing the choice of troop types available, disabling defensive
turrets or decreasing the team's cash flow.
Unfortunately Westwood have managed to foul up the network code as
well, making Renegade a rather laggy experience at the moment. I've
only ever found one server which consistently reports a ping of
under 100ms, even though I have a normally reliable 512kbps cable
modem connection. Most of the best servers are constantly full, and
even with a relatively low ping players tend to warp around a bit
at times, making sniping difficult. When the lag gets any worse you
can end up being dragged backwards across the map or suddenly find
yourself outside a building you just entered because the server
lost track of your movement. And then there's the occasional random
crashes, server drop-outs, unexplained disconnections...

Conclusions

To say that Renegade is disappointing would be a masterful
understatement. The single player game is marred by incompetent AI,
poor mission balance and some very linear maps, while the promising
C&C mode is let down by dodgy network code. If Westwood can fix
the multiplayer problems then it could be a lot of fun online, but
in the meantime this is a game which is well worth avoiding for all
but the most forgiving of Command & Conquer fans.

-

4
/
10

Read the Eurogamer.net reviews policyCommand & Conquer : RenegadeGestaltReview - Westwood's attempt at making a first person shooter sends us to the land of NOD2002-03-09T13:09:00+00:00410